ancient vs. modern sauce or pudding

I enjoy finding medieval equivalents to my modern favorites, and vice versa.  I understand a medieval recipe better when I have spotted its approximate type in modern terms.  For instance, Ein Buch von Guter Speise has an entry it calls a "lattwerk" of cherries.  After reading it carefully, I said, "oh, fruit leather!"  and it made perfect sense.

I very much enjoy Warm Lemon Curd over Strawberries from Peter Berley's Fresh Food Fast. I serve it at the group home where I work and the clients love it too.  So I was intrigued to find How to Make a Verjuice Pottage in The Art of Cooking by Maestro Martino of Como.

There is no verjuice in the recipe.  The orange juice listed would have been bitter (Seville) orange, so today we use half orange and half lemon.
"Pottage" normally  means soup, but this would hardly be eaten by itself in any quantity.  It is more of a sauce, possibly a pudding for dessert.

    "Take four fresh egg yolks, a half ounce of cinnamon, four ounces of sugar, two ounces of rose water, and four ounces of orange juice, and beat together, and cook as you would a sauce, and this pottage should be made yellow with some saffron. This pottage is best during summer."

I treated the "half ounce" as fluid ounce measure, i.e., a tablespoon.

For comparison, Berley's recipe uses whole eggs, not just yolks;  honey instead of rose water for the floral note, lemon juice and zest in lieu of bitter orange juice, no spices, a dash of salt, and 6 tablespoons of butter beaten in late in the cooking.  Proportions remain the same.

We tried both of these side by side at our  May meeting.  Martino's is very cinnamony, scarcely any other flavor detectable, and several members preferred it as to taste, but the texture is rather gummy.  Berley's is much more like a pudding or a dip.  Both were good on the strawberries, on toast, and Martino's was good on meat and sweet potatoes too.

  The next question is, which of Berley's tweaks is responsible for the improved texture?  The whole eggs, or the butter?  The honey?  To settle this, I will try Martino's recipe with each of these changes separately --  when I have a lot more eggs again.  The hens are really good at Hide the Egg.

February 18, 2015
Tried Martino's recipe with butter beaten in, this seems to be the key to texture.  Should be a great apple dip.